GeekDad time travels with a 30-year-old cassette

As kids, one of our most enjoyable bits of gadget fun was
recording jokes, songs and stories on a cassette recorder. I had a
great time messing around with my three younger siblings, but alas,
those cassettes are long gone. It's the kind of physical media experience that our own kids just won't
have.

Mind you, we kids weren't the only people in our household
making tapes. Recently, our mum found another cassette; one that's
much more valuable.

It was an old tape our dad made in the early 80s. From memory,
it was him reading kids books -- Noddy, The Railway
Stories -- that sort of thing. My father used to travel for
work, so he'd made this cassette for bedtime stories while he was
away. And here it was, in my hand three decades later.

The reason for my excitement goes beyond simple nostalgia. You
see, my father passed away in an accident in 1994. My son (aged 19
months) and his five cousins will never get to meet their grandad
on my side of the family. My little fella will never be able to
share hundreds of normal, everyday "grandfatherly" experiences.
Except one: bedtime stories. That's if I could safely retrieve the
audio off this thirty-year old cassette.

Like most GeekDads, my home has been cassette-free for years. I
had an old "boombox" in the garage, but I was concerned how the
precious tape would fare in it. So I borrowed an old
state-of-the-art cassette deck from an
audio producer friend. If I was going to try this -- I'd give it my
best shot.

I plugged it into the PC, put in the tape,
crossed my fingers and pressed play. The wheels turned, and.... it
worked. First the clunk of an old tape recorder going into record
mode, then a bit of hiss, then my dad started reading a
Noddy story. Fantastic.

Still worried that stopping and starting the tape could lead to
breakage, I let it run. And it played all the way through, without
a hitch. The resulting .wav file was then safely copied onto my backup drive (and a
CD-R).

Do you have any old tapes worth preserving? If you do, now's the
time to act. Each one is slowly deteriorating, and my lucky story
was simply that: luck. Those old tapes you found in a shoebox might
last another 10 years, or they might not. Better to be safe than
sorry.

This excellent tutorial will get you started, by explaining how to connect a
tapedeck to your PC. It also teaches you how to de-noise your audio
using the freeware Audacity editor. I highly recommend it, having
made amazing improvements to my 30-year-old recording. I actually
went one step further with my dad's old kids stories, by adding
some free high-quality sound effects from Stephan Schutze's sound
library, plus some great Creative Commons-licensed music.

This has been a great project for my extended family, with
nicely-presented CDs for each niece and nephew. Closer to home,
it's been a wonderful way to introduce my late father to my little
boy.

Gabe McGrath is one of Wired.co.uk's new
GeekDads!

Poll

What do you have family memories sitting on?

Cassette tape. *

Cine film. *

Projector slides. *

VHS. *

We're all digital. *

Edited by Nate Lanxon

Comments

This is a really moving article. Felt a tear well up, wishing that I had my own father's voice on cassette.(P.S. the poll is broken.)

Lisa

Mar 10th 2011

In reply to Lisa

It is a great little story isn't it. It's awesome when technology can help us bridge the gaps we can't cross ourselves.

Andy Robertson

Mar 10th 2011

Wonderful story which will certainly get me shifting boxes to look for tapes. I can only imagine how much joy it will bring to the whole of the family.

Stuart

Mar 10th 2011

Thanks very much guys. The cassette also included an added bonus (which I didn't mention as I tried to keep the post to a reasonable length). Side 2 had a professionally-voiced story, copied off a kids 45rpm record. But the interesting bit was a 20 second sequence where one of us kids had obviously hit 'record' by accident, and you can hear us playing and chatting away briefly. Our family never had any sort of video camera, so a brief bit of recorded audio is pretty exciting.

Gabe McGrath

Mar 10th 2011

I wonder if our kids will face a similar dilema in 30 years or so? How to read all these obsolete digital formats to retrieve old digital photos or how to recover data from CDs that have degraded (some have a lifespan of only 5 years or so). The 80s cassette may well be far more durable that stuff we produce today.

Richard Hayler

Mar 10th 2011

Heartwarming and beautifully written story. What a considerate Dad and now a great link through the generations.Florinda 11 March 2011

Florinda

Mar 11th 2011

Richard: You're right. I had a bunch of family photos that I backed up to DVD. When my pc died only a couple of years later I tried to restore and the disk had completely degraded and could not be read. I was gutted.

Don

Mar 11th 2011

Another great article from Geekdad. It must be amazing for the kids to hear stories being read by their late Grandad - a really touching use of technology. I agree with Richard Hayler, how will we ensure that all our pictures, video etc will be kept as the storage formats change? It's easy to put old photos in a shoebox, but what do we do with external hard drives etc in 20 years time.

Alun Ellis

Mar 11th 2011

great article. we were brought up on bedtime stories, and its a lovely tradition that i have managed to pass on to my children, in fact it has probably been the most effective way for me to teach them english, as we speak german at home. my grandfather recorded tapes for us because we grew up in england, whereas he lived in america, so i have very very fond memories of listening to him reading, and my cousin's husband actually went to the trouble of transferring him reading the whole of dicken's "a christmas carol" about ten years ago, so when i played it for my children last december they loved it.